Celine Song's directorial debut. Two childhood friends meet again twenty-four years later. The quietest film of its year.
The film unfolds across three time periods. Twenty-four years ago: Na Young and Hae Sung are twelve-year-old schoolfriends in Seoul. Na Young's family is emigrating to Canada. They have a final walk together and say goodbye. Twelve years ago: Na Young, now using the name Nora, is a writer living in New York. She reconnects with Hae Sung on Skype. They speak across continents for several months and then mutually decide to stop. Present day: Hae Sung visits Nora in New York for the first time. Nora is married to Arthur, a Jewish-American writer. The three spend roughly a week together.
The film's third act is the goodbye scene between Nora and Hae Sung on an East Village street. They stand silently. Hae Sung leaves to fly back to Seoul. Nora walks home crying. The film closes with Nora's husband holding her on their stoop. The film refuses any conventional resolution; what has happened between Nora and Hae Sung is left undefined.
Past Lives is Celine Song's first film. Song is a Korean-Canadian playwright who had not directed before. The film was made for approximately $12m and distributed by A24. It received three Oscar nominations at the 2024 ceremony (Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director). It won zero. The Academy honoured Oppenheimer that year.
What's structurally remarkable about the film is its restraint. The story is, in some sense, autobiographical — Song's husband is Justin Kuritzkes, an American writer, and Song herself emigrated from Korea to Canada as a child. The film could have been a melodrama. It is instead one of the quietest features of the 2020s, with a runtime under two hours, no score during dialogue scenes, and a refusal of any single dramatic climax. The third-act goodbye is delivered in held wide shots with almost no movement.
The film's central concept — in-yun (인연) — is a Korean expression for the karmic connection between two people across multiple lifetimes. Nora explains it to Arthur in a scene roughly thirty minutes into the film: every brushed hand, every glance, every connection between two strangers is, in the Korean folk-religious tradition, the consequence of some thousand prior lives' worth of accumulated relationship.
What the concept allows the film to do is reframe Nora and Hae Sung's relationship without making it romantic. Their connection is not, strictly, a missed love story; it is a recognition of accumulated history that does not need to be acted on. The film is making, structurally, an argument against the standard American romantic-drama framing in which connection must be either consummated or tragically lost. Past Lives proposes a third option: connection that is genuine, valuable, and does not require a relationship.
The film's most-overlooked structural achievement is John Magaro's Arthur — Nora's American husband. The standard third-act-conflict approach to Past Lives's premise would be to make Arthur the obstacle to Nora's reconnection with Hae Sung. The film refuses this. Arthur is openly insecure about his place in Nora's life, talks about that insecurity directly with Nora, and ultimately gives her the space to process her connection with Hae Sung on her own terms. The relationship between Nora and Arthur is shown as functioning rather than as compromised.
What this allows the film to do is locate the third act's drama entirely in the internal experience rather than in external conflict. Nora is not choosing between two men. She is processing what her own life has become. Arthur is, in some sense, the audience's surrogate for understanding the situation. The performance is among the most-quietly-disciplined supporting work of the 2020s.